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In a
previous article,
I reviewed four integrated development environments for Python: Wing IDE,
Pythonworks, IDLE, and Pythonwin. Two of those were commercial—Wing IDE and
Pythonworks. The others were Open Source. Since that time, Wing IDE and
Pythonworks have been released in new versions, and two new commercial IDEs have
made their appearance: BlackAdder, from
TheKompany, and
Komodo, from
ActiveState.

Before plunging into an in-depth review of BlackAdder and Komodo, I'd
like to give a short update on the four products I reviewed previously:

Neither IDLE nor Pythonwin has shown much development.

Wing IDE, on the other hand, has been steadily updated in a slow but sure
stream of incremental releases. This is now a very stable and very capable
Python IDE. The interface is still a bit confusing, but the stability problems
of the beta version have been resolved, and several new, powerful features have
been added.

If you're looking for a real power tool to use for the development
and debugging of complex Python applications, perhaps in a largish team of
developers, Wing IDE is an excellent choice. For hardcore coding, there's
nothing to beat it.

Pythonworks has also been improved, and is now available for Linux. The
interface is still idiosyncratic, but there are important new
features—multiple editor pads, and a class browser!—and stability has
never been a problem. Performance is a problem, however, especially on
Linux.

Pythonworks is far more capable than it was. I'd recommend a good
look at Pythonworks if you're a subject specialist looking at a helpful
environment to create some specific code, or an educational institution looking
for a great environment in which to teach object-oriented programming. If you
know and love IBM's Visual Age, you might well become extremely fond of
Pythonworks, with its smooth integration with code repositories.

The newcomers, BlackAdder and Komodo, thus face some stiff competition.
Komodo is the IDE for Python, Perl, PHP, XSLT, Ruby, and several others. Created
by ActiveState,
Komodo is based on the Mozilla core. ActiveState also produces its own packaged
versions of Perl and Python and enjoys quite a bit of success with those. It
appears that Perl for many people means the ActiveState package; as for Python,
people still recognize the Pythonlabs version by Guido van Rossum as the primary
release. Komodo is now available for both Windows and Linux.

BlackAdder, by
TheKompany, is
based on the work of Phil Thompson, sip, and PyQt, as well as Trolltech's
Qt Designer. It brings together everything a developer needs for rapid GUI
development with Python and Qt, both on Windows and Linux.